Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 28 June

June 28, 2024

Dear colleagues,

As you will know, we are currently on the second day of the latest round of junior doctor industrial action – which will continue until 7am on Tuesday. Thank you to everyone who has been involved in the diligent planning to ensure we can maintain safe services during this period. As usual, I recognise many staff have gone the extra mile, on top of an already busy workload – thank you.

Throughout all the strike period, you have shown remarkable resilience and professionalism, ensuring that our patients continue to receive the highest standard of care. Your willingness to adapt, support one another, and go the extra mile has not gone unnoticed and is greatly appreciated – please continue this over the weekend and into next week.

The extended hours in our Costa outlets will continue today, through to Monday – the details of this are below.

The warm weather we have been experiencing over the last couple of days has also brought its challenges – trying to keep patients (and yourselves!) cool in our hospital buildings can be difficult. Although it is starting to cool down a little bit, there is some useful advice about dealing with the hot weather on Connect – you can find it here.

Last week the Quality Committee heard of the superb work of our organ donation team. The team has worked to build the organ donation service back up since the covid pandemic and during 2023-2024, they engaged with the families of 10 patients who sadly passed away in our hospitals. This meant that we were able to support 29 patients to benefit from the gift of organ donation. This is the highest number of recipients we have supported in the last 10 years. As well as hosting educational days about donation, their forward focus includes increasing the consent rate; working with the eye hospital on corneal tissue donation; promoting the organ donation week in September and work on the ongoing educational program. One of the biggest challenges with organ donation is families not being aware of their loved ones wishes – and encouraging people to have conversations is often the theme of organ donation week in September. Please don’t wait for this week – you can have this conversation any time – it might just save someone’s life.

This week, our People Committee discussed the growth in our staff engagement score. Between January and April of this year, this has increased by 6.4% – and is now at 6.7 (against a target of 7) – that is double our performance in the last 12 months. At the same time, our staff turnover rate is also at the lowest it has been for three years.  Our People Plan is all about ensuring that SWB is an excellent place for you to work – and these measures indicate to me that we are heading in the right direction. Thank you to everyone who has worked hard on helping us to achieve this including the local effort establishing the People Engagement Teams.

The next step with our engagement score is the launch of the Q2 Pulse Survey on Monday and it will run throughout July. Please do take just five minutes to complete it – it is important that we have this snapshot so we can continue to inform the work of our people engagement teams – who are starting to mobilise across the organisation and will be doing some really good and exciting work.

Finally – to end the week on a positive note, this week the Infrastructure Project Authority, which is the government’s centre of expertise for infrastructure and major projects,assessed our Readiness for Service.

During the review, 29 colleagues from the Trust, Balfour Beatty. EQUANS and our two integrated care systems (Black Country and Birmingham and Solihull) were interviewed. The key lines of enquiry included building readiness, staff readiness, move planning and benefits realisation. I met with the panel yesterday to hear their feedback; they praised our colleagues for their openness and called out many areas of good practice including collaborative partnerships, our approach to risk management and its use in complex decision making, our approach to benefits management and our preparation and planning for move.

They recognise there is still a lot to do to be operationally ready. For me this is great recognition of a massive team effort to move into our new hospital. The experience of the review itself and the recommendations they shared, offers an important learning opportunity to ensure we are ready as best we can be to open Midland Met successfully. Thanks to all of you that are working hard to be ready to move our first patients into Midland Met later this year.

Have a good weekend.

Rachel